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What does it take for cities to innovate at scale?

04 November 2021

By: Bas Boorsma, Chief Digital Officer for the City of Rotterdam and Professor of Practice, Urban Innovation and Smart City at the Thunderbird School of Global Management

How can cities move beyond the incremental, and avoid ‘death by pilots’? How do we prepare for public-private partnerships that can deliver on city innovation agendas long term?

Smart cities have helped set agendas and, over the past two decades, have produced a series of relevant innovations. However, many smart city initiatives have proved underwhelming, rarely evolved beyond the initial pilots, and all too often produced a surprisingly repetitive series of ‘innovation theatre’ acts. All too often it has left collaborating public and private partners insufficiently satisfied with the results.

I know, as I have been engaged on all sides. And all sides agree we need to prepare for innovations that scale, helping deliver the impact our communities seek. How do we get there?

  1. First of all, start with genuine city goals. Work on innovations that have a clear tie-in to the community’s DNA (and not because the city next door is doing it), involve all stakeholders, citizens included. The other side of the coin of this truism has got to be that one should not start out the urban innovation journey with tech. Technology is a means, not an end in itself – period.
  2. Build the public private partnerships we need. These are agile partnerships in which each side holds the other side accountable for what they do best. And that comes with a warning: check your assumptions as to what you think each partner is actually best at. For example, companies may not be the great innovators they are made out to be. And your public sector partner may in fact not just be an orchestrator and a market regulator, but an aggressive investor and innovator as well. Plan for such partnerships to last a long time – long enough to see a commitment through, see innovations scale and survive electoral cycles
  3. With the previous point is also implied the need to rethink the roles of government and public sector at large. Four decades of neoliberalism have induced and help sustain the idea that government is best off small, should not interfere with markets unless they fail and should basically leave the streamlining of innovation and economic development to the market. I am touching on the points raised by Mariana Mazzucato in her book Mission Economy – government will have to rethink how it can also be orchestrator, convener, investor and innovator. In doing so, public sector can set things in motion and help create where market forces will be reluctant, slow or even averse. As Mazzucato points out, America’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has proved this over many decades: without government, there would be no man on the moon, no internet and no mRNA vaccine. If our cities are to successfully address the gravest challenges of our time, as well as the most enlightening of opportunities successfully, government must step in and help drive a ‘mission economy’.
  4. Our cities must frame, prepare for and adopt a ‘mission economy’. Think climate change. Think the mobility systems of the future. Think a massive overhaul of our power grids – something most cities across the world are in dire need of. Think digital equity. None of these can be addressed effectively wholesale by maintaining an incremental approach. It requires a mission economy with government leading the orchestra.
  5. Converge existing innovation initiatives such as living labs, innovation districts, start-up accelerators, test-beds and innovation campuses strategically and systematically. Often such initiatives are doing well in their own right. Yet the city may prove more successful at its innovation aims by linking such initiatives smartly, having them collaborate and allowing them to do what they do best, depending on where they sit in the quintessential innovation pipeline – from early iteration to proof of concept, from proof of concept to demonstrator, to proof of value and finally scale. For instance, a living lab may help facilitate great proofs of concepts, but without a real-world proof of value in a downtown area they may never scale.
  6. For all innovators (whether a start-up, tech enterprise or government agency): keep your presumed friends close but keep your presumed enemies closer. Plenty of start-ups typically delay tricky questions about cybersecurity, ethics and regulations – all too often regarded as showstoppers – to be dealt with at a later stage. Yet the ambassadors of ethics, the soldiers of cyber-resilience and the regulators can typically become the innovator’s best friends if they are brought into the design process early.
  7. Live the paradigm shift, truly. Industrial revolutions typically start out with a disruptive technology that at first gets used to optimise an old world. Only later, these technologies help produce novel solutions, new business models and new designs bringing about a new world, a new paradigm. So many smart city initiatives of the past have failed miserably at this. And in all fairness, it is deeply challenging for most to peer beyond the horizon of the world we know. Many examples abound: most smart parking solutions can best be labelled 21st-century solutions for 20th-century problems. Because in a world where cars get fully automated and come on-demand – and can be dismissed to park at the edges of town until called for, what is the point in maintaining the huge amount of downtown parking spaces that constitute the norm today? Why plan for right of way for fire trucks and real-time insights provided by digital twinned buildings for more efficient firefighting if self-sensing and self-mitigating buildings are likely to reduce large-scale fire outbreaks in the future? Am I thinking too far out? Perhaps. Yet non-incremental innovation requires the ability to stare the paradigm shift in the eyes – and deal with it.
  8. Get citizens involved – let us avoid ‘citizen engagement’ becoming an empty mantra, serving the purpose of political correctness only. Go where people are, leverage empathy, listen. Engage where it makes sense to engage. Be ready to deal with what you hear or get. Be honest and don’t turn citizen engagement into religion. In deciding on a sensor monitoring the integrity of an underground sewage system, you may not need citizens to get involved – and that is perfectly fine.
  9. Bring the key stakeholders of your urban innovation ecosystem into joint scenario visioning exercises. This will help you to think beyond the here, now and the incremental – and collectively act upon the findings such scenario exercises produce. For instance, imagine a scenario like this: it’s the year 2029 and the big cyber attack on your city comes. Power grids are offline, payment systems are down, grocery shops close, logistics grind to a halt, as do citizen services. Chaos ensues. Run the assessment: what could have been done in the preceding eight years to provide the city with the cyber-resilience and network redundancy that would have helped it to weather the storm?
  10. All points above taken together, when managed effectively, allow for the entire city to become an urban innovation system, a system that is so much larger than the sum of its parts. The City of Aurora, Illinois, positioned its entire community as one large innovation district years ago. 22@Barcelona innovation district has produced lessons applied systematically in Barcelona at large. Tampere, Finland is evolving its old industrial district to become an innovation district, but a very large one at that. These are great examples that deserve to be learned from but they still do not represent a final destination. The journey is long and addressing all of the above is an art.

I proudly serve the City of Rotterdam as its Chief Digital Officer. The Rotterdam CDO office prioritises citizens, neighbourhoods and digital equity. The city’s living labs and geographies of innovation are being evaluated, a smart convergence is being targeted, and comprehensive methodologies that integrate the above are being defined. The city is setting its moonshots, wishing to craft its own Green New Deal, while realising that this needs to be married to a new digital deal to be successful.

We have a long way to go, but we are underway.

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